“Buying Gear is Wrong.”

The title of this post is a comment that I received the other day on my ‘I got a drop’ post. The quote from the commenter in full:

“… Congratulations on the dagger, been one of those 7.3 readers for a while and your quest for a dagger has been the highlight of my week. Reading this post though, I can’t help but wonder at the greatness of GDKP and grow increasingly frustrated at my guildmates who insist that it is “The end of WoW” and “buying gear is wrong”. In cases like yours though? Thumbs up …”

This attitude was prevelant in my old guild also. I didn’t understand it then and after using and experiencing the GDKP system I sure as hell don’t understand it now. Lets look at the advantages of a GDKP system:

1: Everybody gets something. You either get the drops you want or you get gold. And it can be a lot of gold, which means that even if you aren’t much of a gold making goblin, the next time a drop comes up that same gold you earned on previous GDKP runs will enable you to bid on some gear that you need. There is nothing worse than running raids week after week, month after month, waiting for that drop and then it comes down and you to lose to the variance of a random roll. Oh of course you could be using a DKP system or something like that but this brings me to the next advantage of using GDKP …

2: It’s simple. In my old raiding guild where I was the GM, I was also in charge of the loot system. That gave me more headaches and took up more time than that chick who told me who hobbies were cooking and nymphomania. You don’t even need an addon for GDKP, (although some are available), just divide the gold by number of people present at the end of the run. Our guild uses a slightly different version where the 2nd highest bidder gets 30% of the gold from that bid. So the rogue who was bidding against me for that dagger got a clear 830 gold from me directly as well as a 10% share in the final total pot. No imputting of data after a raid, no following through with calculations trying to see who has how many points, do points deteroiate over time, do you need to be wearing a pink tutu at 12pm on the zenith of the sun in the equinox of Mars ….

3. It encourages active and smart players. The type of players who make a lot of gold are the type who investigate things to the best of their ability. They read blogs, scour the internet, try things out and make a lot of effort. They’re not the sort of players to just run a few dailies and think that’s all the gold they need. Thus these types of players will generally also be the type to research their class, boss fights, other classes etc. The type of player who has no gold, or epic flyer, or makes no effort will not do well with a GDKP system. They are excluded based on natural selection. You get a better quality player overall using this system. However, anyone can roll need.

There are some disadvantages of course. A person who was gold capped could theoretically bid on everything, but he would just be giving away gold if he did so, thus even in this situation you would still come out ahead. A hunter in our raid was encouraged to bid against the rogues on an axe drop as it was a slight upgrade for her. Her response was that it might be a slight upgrade but in the hands of a rogue it was a much bigger upgrade for her as that rogue could use the axe to get her out of the shit. This is a healthy attitude to have, but lots of players just see a loot drop and want it without any more consideration. If they have the gold they can take it from you, but you are still receiveing gold for it.

I say that buying gear is not wrong at all. Leaving gear distrbution up to random rolls is wrong and unfair and ultimately results in much frustration and bitterness for players. And making one or two officers in the guild handle a weighty and complicated loot distrubution point system is unfair as well. GDKP – you gets the loots or you gets the gold. It’s a win-win.

The problem my guildies had with the system was that people get “carried” in GDKP runs and so bad players get good loot and said guildies will no longer be able to differentiate between the two based on GearScore.

I often enjoy a weekly Gdkp run on our server, as a highly popular and successful pug. Those that join are often skilled raiders interested in specific drops for an alt or likewise.

The thought about using a similar system for guild runs have crossed my mind. However due to the nature of my guild the only true advantage I can see is to get over the dreaded randomness of /roll. With gold its at least something different that decides the outcome.

I guess it would be nice to see the gold rolling in and after a couple raids it would be easy to find the gold to bid on shit. Buuut!

I hate any system that involves bidding, however, because it allows people to be total dickheads. To be more specific Open Bidding. Many times in a previous guild I found one of my class rivals bidding against me on items which were essentially minor upgrades for him. I found out later from a mutual acquaintance that he often did this deliberately (and admitted so)to make sure he had less competition when his item dropped.

I run an EPGP addon at the moment. Simple, easy to use and we get very little complaints. It discourages points whoring and encourages attendance. If you could just buy an item you could afford to miss whatever the hell you liked and show up on loot day.

There are quite a few choice epics on the AH that you would more easily be able to afford if you get the thousands of gold from GDKP runs. Better gems/enchants. That gold can go a long way for improvments then just hoping to bid on gear.

The main disadvantage that I can see would involve gold buying. This system would encourage much more of that.

The problem with GDKP is that to be a valid bidder (potential winner) you have to invest a lot of time into goldearning.

Considering WOW is the game and not a full-time job, you get different players in the system: low and high educated, empulsive and long-thinking, art-, engeneering- or economics related people. While the auction house might look like a anothere exercise about macro-economy it is quite a headache even for non-economy related engeneers/scientists (and i am not talking about less related sectors like art or sport for ex.).

So for some people it takes much less effort to get gold and even finding out the ways how to earn it.
And this comes to the point – people start playing WOW for gold not for pleasure or adventure. For example: skilled (‘Kingslayer’) player would get really mad if he had to “farm” gold, and in this way loosing time he would gladly invested in doing some rare/fun quests(it gives a really high “wtf” feeling after you “carry” half of your raid after reading and researching tacts for 1 hour).

I personally don’t care for bidding systems either, Gold or otherwise. The fact of the matter is that some people like me have a “raid benefit” mentality and I just don’t think systems like that can fit together that well with how I see things. I like loot council systems myself, but obviously that doesn’t work in pugs! Hell, it doesn’t work in a lot of guilds either.

I can understand the idea behind GDKP, but the problem is that you can earn the currency you are using by not even showing up to raid but once. So, for example, what if you have showed up to every single Professor Putricide kill that your group has ever done, but people just didn’t happen to bid on loot and you didn’t make as much gold. Then rogue 2 shows up, and happens to be good with the AH, or maybe they got lucky and sold some BoE’s. They drop 30k gold randomly on the dagger out of nowhere. … what? Well either you don’t get it or you have to blow an obscene amount of gold on something the same itemlevel as Battered Hilt weapons. I guess it’s just me. I used to run DKP systems too and even that system was flawed in my opinion. I’ve just had a really good experience with loot council so far.

Not to mention as a raider the idea that someone “doesn’t do research” if they don’t have a lot of gold is just plain silly. I think the important thing is do you research what’s important? Maybe making more gold than you need to operate (fully gem/enchant yourself, full consumables, etc..) is unnecessary in some peoples’ eyes. It certainly is in mine, but everyone feels differently. In fact, I’d say that 75% or more of the people on my server who are 25 man Kingslayer (or players who I would say are extremely good at their class in PvP/PvE) don’t have more gold than they need to operate, or they just passively make their gold.

My guild used to sell loot to pug players in raids (although we’ve stopped now since our focus is entirely on working on 25 man LK HM) and honestly, it’s not the buying of the gear that’s bothersome, it’s more that there’s a time and place to do that sort of stuff.

That’s entirely true. That’s what I mean when I say that loot council does not work for pugs, and it certainly doesn’t work for most guilds. It works for mine because I feel like there is a representative of every class involved that is able to adequately communicate the benefits of different pieces of gear to the rest of the council well enough that they can all make an informed decision.

you dont get carried for gear in a gdkp run. at least not on my realm. but most people dont get it that in a gdkp run you have to do your job just like in a normal raid.
its not like buying “starcaller” or icc10 achievments + all you can loot.

I suspect that the only problem arises, where someone plays wow for only short periods of time, but in rl has a Platinum Amex card and would think nothing of the cost of buying 200,000 gold before a gdkp run, because frankly to do so costs peanuts in pounds, and then outbids Adam on the next dagger. I imagine this might make for an interesting blog down the line.

gold sellers constantly advertise $25 US = 10K gold. therefore, 200K gold = $500 US. anyone stupid enough to drop $500 on in-game currency is too stupid to make it in a GDKP run, no matter how small a portion of their wealth $500 represents.

Smart rich people know not to waste money on dumb shit.
Stupid rich people stand in fires and get kicked out of any decent run.

It’s always interesting to see the comments and thinking from people playing in “less advanced” servers. I hail from Frostmourne – US hordeside and GDKP PUGS are prevalent on this server. So much so that the number of GDKP pugs > non-GDKP pugs.

Gevlon’s “refined” bidding system just makes things more complicated but whatever. The important thing is the concept of the GDKP run has shown itself to be superior and popular with PUGS. All this talk about buying gear with gold being wrong is nonsense and propagated by weak players. The only thing wrong would be to use real-life currency to buy in-game gear.

As for the arguments that Kingslayers won’t come to GDKPs, this is incorrect. GDKPs was invented so that it encouraged these high-end players to participate. They may come just for one specific item and if they don’t win anything, they still get gold in the end. I’m in a 8/12 HM ICC25 guild but I miss the excitement that a GDKP run can provide.

Now, I’m not sure if this post was arguing that GDKP should be used for guild runs as well. In this case, I disagree. In fact, the hardmode guilds disagree as well (if they agreed, they would be using it). GDKP does not distribute loot efficiently for progress. It also creates dis-incentives during “wipe nights”. We once spent 3+ hours on Saurfang-25 hardmode. Would raiders be encouraged to turn up if they know they won’t be rewarded?

I might respond to this in an actual post, but if you guys are thinking that there is no opportunitism in guilds then you are deluded. I don’t know how many times we geared players up just to see them leave to a higher raiding guild when they came up against the progression wall that we were presently at. At least give us some gold before you bugger off to greener pastures.

kinda a fatalistic view imo. If you’re always going to be one of the middle guilds on your server then thats a problem. I suppose I’m lucky in that I’m on a little backwater server and that because its such a small community everyone knows everyone else and there isn’t so much jumping ship for loot because it bites you in the ass.

But at the same time – distributing the loot evenly means smoother progress and I don’t know about you but I could care less for gold. I’ve bought everything for my main I could want. Oursystem rewards the steady players and we tend to spot the loot whores (it is always freaking annoying, we had 1 guy server transfer to a guild slightly more progressed after blowing his prio).

I’d say if people are wanting to move on a lot – you’re recruiting the wrong people (playstyle wise or commitment wise)